1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a liquid ejecting head that ejects liquid, a recording apparatus that performs recording on a recording medium using the liquid ejecting head, and a recording method that performs recording using the liquid ejecting head and the recording apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, inkjet recording apparatuses that perform recording by ejecting droplets from ejection orifices of a recording head have become widespread rapidly. In such an inkjet recording apparatus, an interference between an airflow generated by ejection of droplets onto a recording medium and an airflow generated by relative motion between a recording head and the recording medium tends to cause a vortex in front of an ejection orifice row in the scanning direction (see FIG. 10). Such airflows are known to affect the quality of a recorded image. In particular, ink droplets (hereinafter referred to as “satellite droplets”) accompanying main ink droplets and having smaller diameters than the main ink droplets are more significantly affected by the airflows described above. As a solution to the problems described above, U.S. Pat. No. 6,997,538 discloses an inkjet recording method and an inkjet recording apparatus.
FIG. 12 illustrates a configuration of a recording head applied to the inkjet recording apparatus disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,997,538. During recording, the inkjet recording apparatus discharges gas to cause an airflow between the recording head and a recording medium to flow parallel to the recording medium. The inkjet recording apparatus strongly discharges the gas to blow away the vortex described above, thereby reducing the effect of the airflow.
However, this technique requires a relatively large amount of gas to be discharged into a space between the recording head and the recording medium. As a result, discharging the gas may increase the amount of deviation in the landing positions of droplets ejected from ejection orifices.
In the inkjet recording apparatus, the ejection orifices may be densely formed in the recording head to improve the quality of a recorded image. Also, to achieve high-speed recording, the ejection frequency for the recording may be set to a relatively high value.